


Tipple

by Nope



Category: Criminal Minds, Numb3rs
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-04-06
Updated: 2006-04-06
Packaged: 2018-10-31 19:20:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10905789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nope/pseuds/Nope
Summary: Reid is twelve the first time he has a drink.





	Tipple

_The question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or the others crazy?_  
**\--Albert Einstein**

Reid is twelve the first time he has a drink. It's beer, warm, the dregs of a can. Uncle Larry laughs when he chokes on the bitter, almost rancid taste.  
  
"Stuff'll rot your brain," Larry says.  
  
Reid -- who's sporting a deluxe assortment of fist and feet shaped bruises under his wife-beater and his short pants because by the time he learnt you never show people the whole of what you can do it was far, far too late -- thinks 'I hope so' so hard he's sure Larry hears him. His Uncle just smiles genially. Reid takes another gulp.  
  
#  
  
Reid is thirteen the first he gets drunk. It takes a while to get there --Larry always noticed if he took more than one beer, and there's only so much he can siphon off from his mother's cut-glass sherry decanters without starting another argument between his parents -- but he finally collects enough.  
  
A blood alcohol concentration of point eight will get you arrested for impaired driving. Point twelve and you might start vomiting. Point fifteen and your legs go, your voice blurs. Point thirty and you might pass out. Point forty and you might die. Reid has read all the literature. He knows the theory. He's made his hypothesis. Now to test it.  
  
He gags on the first two drinks. By the eighth, they're going down smooth. By the twelfth he's having trouble filling the glass. By the fifteenth he's saying "fuck you" at his trembling hands and trying to drink directly from the bottle. He doesn't remember much after that, though his scribbled notes continue for at least another half-page before degenerating into scribbles and "die die DIE" scrawled so hard the papers ripped through.  
  
Head pounding, eyes hot and prickling, muscles aching, tongue furry, he drags himself to college, aces Trig, History and Biology tests and throws a screaming fit in the men's bathroom.  
  
#  
  
Reid is fourteen the first time he wonders if he's an alcoholic. He does not think this because he has taken to carrying a hip flask everywhere he goes, nor because he's always had at least three drinks before he leaves for school, nor because he's learned if he lets himself be used as a handy punch-bag, walking ATM and point of call for horny, pissed off college kids they'll happily buy him alcohol with his money and the fake IDs he makes them, but because he realises that it's a weekend, all his homework is done, he's alone in the house, and he's still drinking.  
  
He reads the literature. Facts, figures, statistics. Medical journals, articles, newspapers, anecdotal reference. He builds a model of what an alcoholic is and compares himself to it, but it's not enough. It's fuzzy. He fits and he doesn't fit. Which is it?  
  
Spring Break comes around. He stops drinking on the Friday. By Tuesday he's slept a total of ten hours, he's torn through four reams of paper and eighteen notepads, and he ends up teaching himself how to pick locks just so he can get into his father's cabinet and drain the Scotch just so he can hear himself think inside the flurry of his own thoughts.  
  
When he can breathe again, he carefully boxes the question of alcoholism away in a corner of his head. It doesn't matter if it's an addiction. It leaves him functional and that's enough.  
  
#  
  
Reid is fifteen the first time he seriously considers he might be significantly autistic. The university library has just received the latest edition of the recently published fourth revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). He takes it, and a bottle of Springbak whiskey, up to his cubbyhole and reads through it, alighting on the section on Asperger's Syndrome (299.80) with particular interest, finding resonance in the description of qualitative impairment in social interaction.  
  
He once attended a lecture on gambling at CalSci -- he's a Vegas boy, he knows all the games, and he's himself, so he knows all the hands, the probabilities, the statistics, card-counting methods and betting systems, the patterns cards and dice and chips -- where he managed to completely lose the demonstration Poker games, not because of the math, but because he couldn't adequately read his opponents. Mind-blind.  
  
Afterwards -- Reid noticed and remembered with vague interest how many people stay just for the games and not for the lecture, just as he noticed and remembered how many people asked questions and which hands they raised and whether they were wearing watches or not, just as he always notices and remembers everything around him -- afterwards, Professor Eppes talked about not just the mathematics of the game, but the mathematics of people. People, Reid learnt, could be modelled. People could be mapped, quantified, described. This was the real lesson of the lecture: people could be understood.  
  
DSM-IV section 299.80 proves interesting but incomplete. The manual's criteria and classification system are based on consultation with psychiatrists. They are an incomplete collection of opinions, not adhering to objective, biologically verifiable standards. The statistics are useful, but they are not enough. Like intelligence, insanity can not be accurately quantified. He needs more. He reads more.  
  
Experimental observations. Rigorous formulations. Systematic analysis. In this percentage of this sample of these people, these actions indicate these behaviours. Extrapolate. Adapt. Hypothesis, test, conclusion; rinse and repeat. Things he can learn. Things he can understand. Patterns he can follow, can use. Ways to be more functional. Movement of these muscle groups mean a person is happy, these mean they're sad, angry, bitter, disappointed, drunk, lying, telling the truth. These mean they're interested. These mean a revelation.  
  
'Behavioural science,' he reads. 'Jason Gideon,' he reads.  
  
Fascinated, he takes another drink, and he turns the page.  
  
#  
  
Reid is sixteen the first time he finishes a Ph.D., eighteen when he finishes his third, nineteen when he joins the fast-track for Quantico, and there's a minor hiccup when he has to be perfectly sober for a week to pass the mandatory drug screening and half-way through it he can't help himself jumping to his feet in the middle of a training lecture and correcting the speaker on over a dozen points before he manages to shut himself up. Fortunately the man, himself a long time veteran, takes it calmly and with thanks and, afterwards, offers Reid some suggestions on stress management that Reid ignores but thanks him for. There's a great deal more scrutiny after that, but the drug tests are passed and with a couple of doubles in him he can pass for just eccentric. His room mate thinks he's a teetotaler. Reid doesn't laugh at him, at least not out loud.  
  
#  
  
Reid is twenty the first time he sees a dead body, a proper dead body, out in the field, not in an urn like Grandma (seventy-nine, emphysema) or in an open casket like Larry (fifty-eight, liver failure) or lying on a mortuary slab (Anatomy 201). The cold thrill of it, the information visible in the attacks, in the blood sprays, in the fibres and residues, the sheer, visceral understanding of the patterns of murder, of death, is so strong he doesn't take a drink for hours. He's suggested a profile of the killer (ninety-two per-cent accurate, error margin plus or minus three-percent) two-hundred and forty-eight minutes before he learns the victim's name.  
  
#  
  
Reid is twenty-one the first time he meets Gideon in person. He introduces himself as "Doctor Spencer Reid". Awkward and calculated. Gideon considers him for the briefest of moments -- Reid notices, of course, and remembers -- and then almost smiles. Reid considers the possibilities, the probabilities, the biographies and reports he has read on this man, and decides he has been caught. He smiles back despite, or perhaps because of, this and, when Gideon offers him a drink, Reid actually laughs.  
  
"Welcome to the BAU," Gideon says. "I have some cases that will interest you."  
  
They do.


End file.
